Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 1-3.

When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, He told Moses that He had come to rescue His people from the Egyptians and to bring them into a spacious land flowing with milk and honey.  A few verses later, God tells Moses to tell the elders of Israel the same thing.  A few weeks ago I heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson say that milk and honey are the only foods which do not require something to die in order to become food.  He went on to say that he didn’t think the writers of this passage realized that when they wrote it (this was just an aside, his main topic was criticizing vegans for not eating either of these foods).  It struck me that Neil Tyson had almost touched on something profound, and that he knew that he had.  As I thought about it, I concluded that the fact that nothing needs to die for us to consume milk and honey was part of why God used that expression for the Promised Land.  If nothing else, using that expression here was foreshadowing of the New Heaven and New Earth which God will create after His plans for this earth have been completed.  Nothing will need to die for the wellbeing of those who will live in the New Heaven and the New Earth.  I do believe that when God told Moses that He would bring His people into a land flowing with milk and honey He was telling them He would bring them into a land where He would provide for them and that they would not need to use violence to have their basic needs met.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 1-3.

A few days ago I had mentioned that one of the signs that a story you hear is an urban legend is that it does not contain the names of any of the people involved.  (I want to note that the absence of names does not prove the story did not happen.  It is merely an indicator that you should look at the story a little closer before accepting it as true).  This led me to take note that when the passage talks about the pharaoh telling the Hebrew midwives to kill the males born to Hebrew women, it mentions their names.  Further, the name of one of those midwives appears in a list of slaves held in Egypt from a time which could potentially have been the time of the Exodus, although a little early(I will note that recent discoveries have led to archeologists re-evaluating the dates they had previously given many events in Egypt, which might move this list right into the dates for the Exodus which can be derived from the Bible).  I found the information about the name of one of the midwives while doing a quick Internet search to see if they are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.  They are not.  As part of that search I came across the existence of a document written by an ancient Egyptian sage, Ipuwer, which recounts a time of great disruption in Egypt.  This document contains an account which resembles the account of the Israelites leaving Egypt found in Exodus.  The resemblance is similar enough that it could be describing the same event, but different enough that it may be about a completely different event.  So, while the Ipuwer Papyrus does not prove Exodus, it does mean there are the sort of records which one would expect to exist if it did.

I really struggled with today’s title, because the extrabiblical documents I mentioned in today’s passage do not provide evidence for the biblical account, but they do tell us something about the biblical account.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 1-3.

As I read this my first thought is about something I came across a few days ago when I was trying to determine about when Joseph would have lived.  I found a website which claimed that there was archeological evidence of a settlement in what would have been the region of Egypt Genesis says that Jacob’s family settled in of a group of people connected to Canaan living there.  Further, they claimed there was evidence of a period of time where that group had an extraordinary increase in infant mortality, especially for male babies.  I am unsure how reliable this source was, but it’s links to supporting documentation seemed to indicate there was at least some basis to their claims.  However, the archeology of this passage is only incidental to what struck home to me today.

No what interested me was that when God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, Moses asked God who he should tell the Israelites had sent him.  The more I read this passage the more it seems that Moses was asking God, “Which on of the many gods I know about is the god of our fathers, is the god of the Hebrews?”  God’s reply was a rejection of the idea that He was one of many different gods, just the one who had taken the Hebrews under his wing.  This exchange reads to me like there were stories passed down among the descendants of Jacob, stories which we now have as the Book of Genesis, which spoke of a god who did all of those things and was the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Further, it reads like perhaps the Hebrews in Egypt debated which one of the gods of Egypt, and elsewhere , that god was.  Here God is telling Moses that the reason none of those stories identify Him with one of those other gods is because He is not like any of them.  We have a record of various civilizations throughout history making connections between gods in their pantheon and the gods of other pantheons.  Sometimes it was one civilization saying that this god in their pantheon matched up to that god in their pantheon (for example the Romans said that Jupiter and Zeus were the same god).  Sometimes it was one civilization saying that yes, the gods of other civilizations are valid gods, but they are subordinate in the hierarchy  to our gods (or perhaps only subordinate to our chief god.  I cannot at the moment think of an example, but I know I have seen such references).  But here God was saying that He had no connections to those other pantheons.  God was, and is, and is to come, the Beginning and the End.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 1-3.

When I first started to actually pay attention to history, I “learned” that the Exodus has to be a myth because none of the Egyptian (or other archeological records) support the idea that the events in Exodus happened.  Then I learned about the Hyksos “invasion” and rule over Egypt.  My mind immediately thought that a Hyksos ruler becoming Pharaoh would perfectly explain the line in today’s passage where it says, “a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.”  However, I was told that would not work because the Exodus happened long after the Hyksos were driven from Egypt.  As I learned more, I discovered that despite historical scholars dating the Exodus to the 13th Century BC (1300-1200 BC), Biblical dates put the Exodus at 1446 BC.  While I question the logic of arriving at such precise dates from Biblical sources (all other written records from the time period when the Old Testament was written were not concerned with precise dates), it fits with the date of the transformation in character of an Egyptian Pharaoh (before 1446 BC Pharaoh Amenhotep II was portrayed as arrogant and bombastic, after 1446 he was portrayed as thoughtful and wise).  And 1446 BC would have been about 100 years after the Hyksos were driven from Egypt.  Which allows time for what happened in verses 1-15 to happen.  Relative to my questioning of using the Bible for precisely identifying a year, there are debates about the chronology of Egypt.  One set of scholars has Amenhotep II ascending to the throne in 1454 BC and another saying that happened in 1427 BC.

While there are many spiritual lessons for us in this passage, this year I am going to spend a little more time on the “history” of the passage (although I hope, as always, that you read the passage for yourself).  One of those points is Moses’ name.  If the Exodus happened in 1446 BC, the Pharaoh when he was a child would have been Thutmoses III.  Note the similarity in names.  This is especially important when you realize that the first part of Thutmoses was a variation of the name of the Egyptian god Thoth, and that the name meant “born of Thoth.”  Similarly, other Pharaohs had names which ended in “moses” or “mses” and started with the name of an Egyptian god.  Now, the Israelites did not speak the name of God, as a general rule.  So, Moses being raised by a daughter of Pharaoh, who knew he was a Hebrew (an Israelite), may have named him “__Moses”, meaning “born of __” where “__” was the unspoken name of God.